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Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

macworld.com

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Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#51

Post by inatreecrown2 »

zer0zzz wrote: post #46
SXX wrote: post #45

Apple could easily make gaming on Mac feasible by contributing to Proton, Wine, DXVK and officially supporting Vulkan at least through translation layer. Or just partner with Valve to do exactly this for their platform. Instead they choose to build another proprietary solution nobody gonna use and that will die as soon as they lose interest.

I agree with you on wine, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are doing this quietly (landing patches to make Wine better on Mac), but for the purposes of making directx shaders perform better I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan (for the goals of making games run better for their customers)?

I wish this were/is true, that Apple supports Wine development. But as far as we know, a year from now Apple will end Rosetta 2 support in macOS 28, and with it the ability to run Wine.

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#52

Post by inatreecrown2 »

zer0zzz wrote: post #44
nicce wrote: post #41

How it is getting priority if they deprecated Rosetta? Or am I understanding it wrongly?

They claim enough of Rosetta will continue to exist for games and things like wine to work. I suspect the main thing they want to kill off are all the x86 slices in the mach-o fat binaries for all of the frameworks.

Do you have a source on that, them claiming continued support for "things like wine"?

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#53

Post by thefz »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #6
bakoo wrote: post #3

The high pixel response time on macbook displays means you'll want an external monitor for multiplayer shooters etc., which most gamers are already fine with, but annoying if you want to game while travelling.

Not a “Gamer” so I’m always surprised small things like this make a difference. As a rule of thumb, what is a minimum frame rate a game needs? From there how much does each extra fps make a difference, and at what point do you hit diminishing returns?

Frame rate has absolutely nothing to do with the screen you project the frames on. In competitive multiplayer shooters, frame rate matters a lot.

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#54

Post by out_of_protocol »

zer0zzz wrote: post #37
cousin_it wrote: post #27

Oh, who gives a damn. Half the games in my Steam library don't work since Apple killed 32bit. When they fix it, I'll know they care about Mac gaming.

Most of those are gonna work using Rosetta, crossover, and the game porting toolkit. You really don’t need Apple to support 32Bit x86 macOS games when it’s not much more overhead to run windows x86 games (which is easily the better library to spend time Optimizing for).

Why bother with macos version at all then? Soon current version becomes unusable as well, and needs windows fallback to run since macos version is useless

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#55

Post by surgical_fire »

sunaookami wrote: post #50
SXX wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy fix. Apple can just stop breaking compatibility and partner with Valve to port Proton support to Mac. But they wont do it because they want to push their own walled garden. And obviously no one will support it because macOS market share is smaller than Linux market share.

>macOS market share is smaller than Linux market share Not true? macOS has like 12-14% and Linux 3-4%

A very big portion of that is corporate.

I have a macbook home, the one issued by my employer. My personal laptop runs Linux.

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#56

Post by Jyaif »

seabrookmx wrote: post #18
Jyaif wrote: post #16

I don't think the Game Porting Toolkit is useful these days: LLMs one-shot ports from one graphics API to another. Just like programming languages, graphical API choice is irrelevant now.

You're going to need a source for an LLM one-shotting a port of a AAA title from one graphics API to another...

I one-shotted non trivial software from OpenGL to Metal with a cheap (=non state of the art) LLM. That was 6 months ago.

Anything in Unreal Engine that you think Fable wouldn't be able to adapt on its own to a different graphics API?

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#57

Post by archagon »

bakoo wrote: post #3

The high pixel response time on macbook displays means you'll want an external monitor for multiplayer shooters etc., which most gamers are already fine with, but annoying if you want to game while travelling.

I don’t think it matters. My Studio Display XDR has pretty bad motion performance (similar to Macbook, maybe a touch better) and you can still play first-person shooters perfectly fine. In the general case you don’t notice it much. It’s only a problem with fast planar movement, e.g. strafing along a wall and trying to read some text that’s written on it. (Spelunky 2 is much worse than CS in this regard, but still not a massive issue. Just a bit ugly.)

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#58

Post by SXX »

inatreecrown2 wrote: post #51
zer0zzz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on wine, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are doing this quietly (landing patches to make Wine better on Mac), but for the purposes of making directx shaders perform better I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan (for the goals of making games run better for their customers)?

I wish this were/is true, that Apple supports Wine development. But as far as we know, a year from now Apple will end Rosetta 2 support in macOS 28, and with it the ability to run Wine.

AFAIK Crossover is now able to run without Rosetta:

https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2026/6/11/whats-in...

Most likely Wine will work soon too. Only some 32-bit apps will break.

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#59

Post by larrry »

keyle wrote: post #19

This, once again, misses the elephant in the room. The fact is simple, there isn't enough of a Mac gaming market for the game developers to go through the effort. The hardware has been good enough for a while now. I'm not saying this will never change but the developers that shipped games on PC and Mac report something along the lines of 6-11% of users use a Mac. That isn't worth the effort unless you have a very str…

Some engines nicely support Mac out of the box. I’m making a party fighter in LOVE2D and am having a good time developing and playing on Mac (cross platform online play is working well too, my friends are all Windows).

Maybe Unity or Godot also offer this benefit? If so then Mac gaming could become much better supported, at least from indies!

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#60

Post by SXX »

sunaookami wrote: post #50
SXX wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy fix. Apple can just stop breaking compatibility and partner with Valve to port Proton support to Mac. But they wont do it because they want to push their own walled garden. And obviously no one will support it because macOS market share is smaller than Linux market share.

>macOS market share is smaller than Linux market share Not true? macOS has like 12-14% and Linux 3-4%

If you check Steam hardware survey you'll see Linux market sgare is 3% against macOS 2%. This is what matter for game studios.
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